Geopolitically we find ourselves in unaccustomed circumstances as we head into the New Year: the Anglosphere — Britain, the U.S. and Australia in this case — is dominated by the left, while Europe is firmly in the hands of the right — France and Germany, in particular.

Those who speak for AngloSaxonomics are well and truly on the back foot. Curiously, Germany’s Angela Merkel is leading the charge for sensible government spending from within a continent notoriously prone to big government. The turnaround is complete with a return to sterile and ultimately dishonest Keynesianism in the free market transatlantic countries. “Topsyturvy” hardly begins to describe it.

This balance may improve with the election of David Cameron’s Conservatives here in the the UK sometime before summer 2010, but it doesn’t alter the fact that we are in the grip of ideologically-driven governance in key Western countries at a time of acute economic stress.

In times of panic, and we’ve had plenty of those in 2008, politicians revert to type. Gordon Brown’s evident delight in resurrecting the ideology of his youth is plain to see. Chancellor Alistair Darling’s mid-30s were dominated by a bleak Trotskyite outlook on life. In his 50s he’s managed to nationalize a goodly portion of the banking sector, whatever the reason.

Barack Obama and his team are an unknown quantity, but should not be expected to think too far ahead when the printing presses are in full flood. Obama’s role model, F. D. Roosevelt was a President of the left who was not afraid to bring out the big guns of public spending. Payment came later. His reputation rests on his actions during World War 2, especially after Pearl Harbor, which masked the disaster that was the Great Depression and the responses to it.

The enduring problem with the left is that it doesn’t understand human nature. Few liberal-left politicians seem even to know themselves, let alone the rest of the population.

Self-knowledge is the key to good governance. You can’t speak for all, if you don’t speak for yourself. Knowing how to exercise power is not the same as understanding those at the receiving end of your writ.

As a substitute for having a grip on reality, the left has an alarming tendency to fall back on a collection of failed shibboleths: the United Nations, global solutions, so-called human rights, more central government, higher taxes, collectivist policies in general. They don’t recognize that in troubled times most people feel helpless to help themselves. Their world has spun out of control and they need to take it back — not pass it on.

In a crisis, it is important psychologically to direct power to people in their own patch. To open up avenues to self-help, to understand the desperation of active citizens to be in charge of their lives and their families. Crises always seem to put them even more under the thumb of centralized authority rather than set them free to do what they do best in their own interests.

The Brezhnevian Gordon Brown foolishly imagines that the British want a Stalinesque “father of the nation” to lead them out of hard times. Nothing could be further from the truth. The current rehabilitation of Stalin in Russia is an eerie echo of a bad past and should warn us of trouble ahead.

What we now require from our leaders is human psychology, not “universal” human rights that only we respect, and the politically empty “brotherhood of Man”.

John Evans

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To all our readers and advertisers, may 2009 be a peaceful and, despite the slump, a prosperous year.

The River Exe in Midsummer

John Evans

It is Christmas still, officially at least, so a few words on Christianity may be appropriate now. Since I am the one writing this, my own view of it will have to do.

Which proposition would you prefer?:

1. The Ineffable (name it as you will) enters every person at birth and is directly available to each, especially if the individual focuses upon it and requests access, or
2. The Ineffable entered one man 2000 years ago and his representatives on Earth today will negotiate your place in the afterlife, as long as you comply with a set of unbending principles and practices.

The first proposition is the “perennial wisdom of mankind”. The second is the view of the Christian church that arose within the last days of the Roman Empire.

In the 4th century AD the Emperor Constantine had an ulterior motive for his religious masterplan — the retention of political power at the centre. His church was therefore materialistic and authoritarian.

This is not to disparage the present-day Roman Catholic Church, or even the lacklustre Anglican version, into which I was baptized as an infant. On an individual level, many immensely spiritual people have made great contributions to human understanding from within the cupolas of their Catholic beliefs. I’ll cite just a few who appeal to me: Thomas Merton, Teresa of Avila, Meister Eckhart and John of the Cross.

They do, though, have one thing in common. Each got into trouble with the ecclesiastical authorities because they were perceived as “mystics”. Even the saintly Francis of Assisi’s Franciscans fell foul of the stern central authority.

What is a mystic? Someone who believes … no, “knows” … that the Ineffable is available to everyone. These are “Gnostics” — knowers rather than believers. Mysticism is really the universal religion of mankind, because when a person scales its heights there is no longer any need for the simplistic stories and precepts of evangelistic religion.

As Dr Johnson put it: “Example is more efficacious than precept.”

Let’s go back then to the early Roman church, which we now know took the uncomplicated Jewish version of the many Mystery schools around the Mediterranean and as far afield as Persia, and created the Western world as we know it. It’s useful to examine what Christianity was like before Emperor Constantine made it the prevailing faith of the Empire.

Christianity — and it was certainly not called that then — began a long time before the suggested birth of Jesus around 7BC. We know this from the Dead Sea Scrolls and other recently discovered sources.

It seems to have had Egyptian origins and arose among Jews in Alexandria from a Gnostic soup of practical teachings on how to have a direct, personal relationship with the Source of all things. It’s believed to have spread into the Hebrew lands through groups like the Essenes at Qumran — a sect that had at its centre a “Teacher of Righteousness”.

The Mystery schools of the Mediterranean region, including Greece, were mystical programmes of initiation, leading up to the all-encompassing Great Death Contemplation, in which a neophyte underwent a transformation of consciousness, directly experiencing the after-death state and stripping away the tyranny of the body (the cross we all bear in life).

In our terms, Near Death Experiences, reported in many hospitals, are quite close. They are, however, essentially different from the controlled, fully-alive, glimpse of what it’s like to be totally out of the body, while conscious of everything.

The early Gnostic Gospels, such as The Gospel of Thomas give a very different version from the later compilations bolted together by bishops into the New Testament. For example, the female has an equal part to play — there is a Gospel of Mary Magdalene and links to Sophia, or wisdom. The chapter in Luke which covers the visit of Jesus to Mary of Bethany is strangely cut off, and the passage where Jesus says she has a higher calling than Martha — contemplative rather than “active” — doesn’t read like the Christianity that comes down to us via Rome at all.

What began as a Jewish allegory depicting the life of Everyman (Jesus), was turned by a French bishop into an ersatz historical record of a real person. Anyone who has studied spiritual literature around the world will immediately recognize the allegorical intent of the Gospels, despite the extensive editing job.

The main aim was to attract a large, popular audience and wipe out the Gnostics, the early Christians. That suppression continued well into the medieval period. The massacre of possibly millions of Cathars in southern France, simply because they were different and were descended from an earlier version of Christianity, still resonates blackly in Church history to this day. St Bernard of Clairveaux, founder of the Catholic Cistercian movement, commented on the Cathars, “They are better Christians than we are.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in his deeply religious book The Brothers Karamazov, has a chapter called The Grand Inquisitor in which he depicts Catholicism as the very opposite of the church Jesus would have created.

A good illustration of the process of historicizing allegory is to take John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress and imagine Christian as a real man and the story a true one. Nothing else quite explains why the Vatican goes to such lengths to suppress any archeological find that may cast doubt on its version of events. The postwar history of the Dead Sea Scrolls reveals an extraordinary attempt at censorship. The Nag Hammadi Gnostic discoveries in Egypt faced similar interference.

So where is Christianity in the 21st century? The main thrust of the churches seems aimed at keeping people adhered to a faith based on a misreading of an old allegory. The allegory itself, by contrast, offers precisely what it says on the box: “gospel” — good news.

The good news is that everyone can receive proof of their own immortality if they really want it: “The Kingdom of Heaven is within and without … seek and you shall find.” The most enlightening version of that saying appears in The Gospel of Thomas, inexplicably banned by the Church. If people don’t want direct proof, no matter, immortality is theirs anyway.

That mystical interpretation of the familiar Christian message was the original one before Rome politicized it. In reality Constantine was no saint but an early version of Mao Tse Tung.

In our democratic age we are more susceptible to the view that Christianity is available to us directly, not just through the intercession of men in robes.

Today, the Church is faltering, even dying, precisely because it won’t give up the rewriting of history that took place in its early days. Moreover, it should ask itself why so many popular books depict it as a dark, evil institution that will stop at nothing to retain its power, wealth and influence. Surely, self-preservation isn’t everything.

A return to so-called “primitive” Christianity that encouraged personal experience, not conformity, is the only way it can save itself from becoming a minor sect for a few diehards — which would be very sad given the power Christianity has for good.

The world is crying out for genuine expressions of spirituality now. Young people are embracing New Age sects in large numbers. Ominously, Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world.

Christians should stand against the decline of the religion and recognize it is based upon a massive untruth, especially as the original flowering of Christianity is just what the jaded West needs in these times of economic hardship and doubt.

John Evans

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Our person of the year 2008 does not exist … yet.

This person, however, should exist, and we are the poorer because of the absence. So, who is it?

By all logical analysis it should be Barack Obama. Even he might agree, though, that he’s had quite enough publicity for one year already. Besides, The Times (London) has inevitably made him their choice.

You may have noticed we are not a downmarket tabloid so, contrarian as ever, we’ll resist the obvious, with ideologically correct genuflections in his direction.

During this year of wild oscillations of policy, prediction and actuality, one person was missing from the chattering soup here in Britain. Someone with national reach and influence who can say, “Hold on, we tried that in the 1960s/70s and back in the reign of Ethelred the Unready. It didn’t work then, why would it work now?”

We have a national statistician, a national poet, a national medical officer, a national musician, a national scientist, so why not a …

And here is Syntagma’s Person of the Year 2008:

The National Historian.

It may be a blank space now, but it would make some difference if we had one in the future. But who should it be?

The post could be decided by a BBC TV series of shows: Strictly Historical. Votes would come in turn from a panel of eminent judges, a studio audience and, yes, you at home. The comperes would be Vince Cable and Michael Portillo.

In the absence of that this year, we have held our own competition here at Syntagma Towers.

Here are the results:

In second place, Niall Ferguson, whose TV programme, The Ascent of Money on Channel 4, performed some of the tasks of a National Historian by reminding us how the credit crunch came about, and of similar situations and outcomes in the past. It was a creditable perfomance.

The winner, with greater support among our studio audience, was Andrew Roberts, the conservative historian deemed necessary as a counterweight to the prevailing Marxist drift of the nation.

Although the contest was very close, with major voting irregularities, by common consent there was no dance-off.

Congratulations to Andrew on his shadowy victory as the future National Historian of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and Syntagma Person of the Year in reality in 2009.

Note of caution: You may think the above piece is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but I can assure you, we are deadly serious!

John Evans